Sandor Navie/Backstory
Sandor Navie came across The Maker when he was pretty young - he was 20 years old when a clockwork dog approached him in the street and led him to a shop that would ultimately become his home. The keeper of the shop, an elderly Tiefling named Kairon Odds, had been attacked by some of his more unruly customers, and he'd found the need to sign on an apprentice to help him tend the shop. Given that he was a greedy Tiefling, he was not particularly interested in sharing the darker and more profitable side of the shop business with an interloper, but did need to have fresh blood in the house to show some of the more ambitious members of the local rogue's guild that he wasn't going anywhere any time soon. Unfortunately, Kairon was going somewhere soon, as Sandor's naivety seemed, to the guild members, to be exploitable - more exploitable than Kairon's alert and crafty control of shop businesses. It took several assassination attempts - one involving a poison dart that very narrowly missed Kairon's neck as Sandor accidentally knocked him over while picking up a dropped coin - but ultimately Kairon fell very ill with a (likely hand crafted) magical disease. He had to leave the shop to seek treatment from some of his connections, and (knowing that Sandor probably would not be up to the task of protecting the shop), left his Iron Defender, "Maker," with Sandor. The same Iron Defender that had carefully brought Sandor to the shop ten years prior. Upon leaving, Kairon ordered the Defender to protect Sandor and ensure that he would be able to continue tending the shop. With Sandor in charge of the magical shop of poisons, contraptions, and dangerous spells (ostensibly for exterminators and adventurers looking to help deal with dangerous magical creatures), things changed surprisingly little - much to the disappointment of the rogue's guild. Sandor took very affectionately to Maker, who played an outsized role in keeping Sandor in the dark as to the danger the shop posed to him. When inventory came in, Maker carefully checked each box - leaving a mark on boxes that were safe. Sandor, rather than disabling traps or spells on the unmarked boxes, as Kairon would have done, simply thought they weren't for the shop and left them outside. This led to an increase in accidental deaths in the area, unfortunately, but Sandor gathered experience in tending to wounds through taking care of those thieves who tried to take the unmarked boxes. Sandor took time during these five years working on his own in the shop to learn some basic magic skills and work on his true passion - the tinkering with clockwork devices. It was during this time that he created an "Eternal Timekeeper", a clockwork mechanism clock so perfectly calibrated that it was estimated to only lose 27 minutes per day. After several months of pride and showing his clock to many of the customers, Sandor found to his surprise that a misplaced gear, once removed, made his clock even more accurate - it would only lose 1 second every 27 years instead. Sometimes he put the gear back though, because, he would say, "The gear really feels like it belongs in the watch." Sandor accidentally summoned a Shoebill familiar one day in his 6th year under Kairon, as he was struggling with some of the finer mechanics of summoning. He had intended to summon a robin, but not having much conception of what a robin looked like, the Shoebill instead appeared in front of him. He continued to refer to the Shoebill as "robin" throughout his time at the shop, insisting that he wasn't very good at coming up with names. Kairon, who knew what the bird actually was, found this amusing and did not correct Sandor. He allowed Sandor to keep Robin, as the Shoebill was helpful in making customers uncomfortable. After 10 years under Kairon and 5 years of tending to the shop alone, Maker woke him up in the dead of night one evening and urged Sandor out of the shop. The thieves guild and the rogues guild, frustrated with Kairon's continued influence over the shop in the form of Maker (as well as well over a hundred different spells and traps), had decided to destroy the shop and hope someone else would fill the market niche. Maker, ever with one, long, floppy, metallic ear to the ground, had only an hour's notice before the shop was attacked. Rather than try to defend the shop, Maker interpreted his master's instructions to "protect Sandor and ensure that he would be able to continue tending the shop" as instructions to keep Sandor safe over the shop's safety. After all, one day Sandor would open a new shop - Maker would be sure of that. As Sandor, bleary-eyed and slightly cross, was carried out of the city on Maker's back with a few small belongings and Robin scouting ahead, there was a large explosion from the quarter of the city where Kairon's shop was. (Well, had been.) Maker knew that the final defensive spells had been set off, a spiteful farewell from Kairon. "They didn't weigh the Odds!" he would have said, had he been there. The charred and mangled bodies of a few dozen rogues and theives, as well as some very shaken wizards, would not have had much to say to that. Harrumph.